Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  The cult of Monte Verita is unmistakably Barrie’s boy-cult, where being a boy heightens awareness, and never growing up is the path to immortality. It is also a reference to Faust* Goethe’s play in which Faust is himself ‘transmuted’ into a boy and admitted into the ‘choir of blessed youths’, as part of his rehabilitation and transformation after his soul has been rescued by the angels. In the first draft of the story Anna was transformed into a boy, but Daphne’s publisher Victor Gollancz refused to accept what he saw as a trans-sexual transformation and Daphne did not enlighten him.

  Following his initiation the narrator is convinced that, like Anna, he has found his Nirvana, as Daphne too had felt. But it will be bad for him, as all of a sudden, we see it was for Anna. When she and the narrator meet, she throws back her cowl and reveals the truth. ‘You see, it isn’t Paradise . . .’ she says.

  The narrator reels in horror.

  It was as though all feeling had been frozen. My heart was cold. One side of Anna’s face was eaten quite away, ravaged, terrible. The disease had come upon her brow, her cheek, her throat, blotching, searing her skin. The eyes that I loved were blackened, sunk deep into the sockets.

  The whole ghastly vision is a sick recollection of the vision of hell that had been Sylvia’s on seeing her beloved Arthur’s face, ravaged by cancer.

  As The Apple Tree appeared in the bookshops, on 6 September 1952, Daphne was shocked to learn that Gertrude Lawrence had died suddenly of cancer.

  Just fourteen months after she pegged Rachel on Gertie in My Cousin Rachel, with the express purpose of killing her off and thus writing Gertie out of her life, the actress had died for real, at only 54. ‘My God,’ Daphne wrote to Oriel, ‘you have to be jolly careful when you bring [pegs] into practical living issues.’

  Daphne claimed that it took four years to get over Gertie’s death, not because she missed her, but because she was shocked to discover that Gertie, after she died, meant nothing to her at all. In truth, Daphne cared less for losing Gertrude than for the gap her death left in her fantasy life. ‘I was quite bouleversée by the death; not because how sad, a friend had died, but how bottomless – a Peg had vanished! A fabric that one had built had disintegrated!’

  Their affair had been a fiction inscribed by her imagination on the fabric of her life. It was, she said, ‘pure Gondal, purely imaginary. Recording her feelings about this woman whom she had ‘known’ intimately but only ever ‘in character’, Daphne began to realise that in allowing not only ‘a character in a book to develop from a real person [but also] a real person being pegged from a character’, she was living in an unenviable realm totally divorced from reality.

  ‘Tray goes through many more inner experiences than you have perhaps credited her with,’ she wrote to Oriel in October 1956, ‘and when you say, as you have in the past, how beaming my life must be, you have perhaps not realised the rather fantastic inner world I have so often dwelt in . . .’

  More incredible still, the whole episode parallels Behold, We Live, the play in which Gerald had starred with Gertrude in 1932. Gerald (Gordon Evers) doesn’t want to upset Gertrude (Sarah Casenove) by telling her that he is terminally ill. In their last farewell, an emotional scene, the audience knows that they will never see one another again, but Sarah (Gertie) is unaware. Charles Laughton said it was the most effective scene he had ever witnessed in the theatre. And it was exactly the one played out in America the last time Gertie and Daphne met – but this time the roles were reversed. The reality was, if you like, a mirror image of the fantasy. Gertie knew she had cancer when she said her last heartfelt goodbye to Daphne from her bed at two o’clock one morning in Florida, but she withheld the information so as not to upset her. Daphne remembered her last words: ‘Go from me, and don’t look back, like a person walking in their sleep.’ She used them in ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’, another story in The Apple Tree.

  * Harry T. Moore, The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence (1980). It is generally supposed that Lawrence came to Barrie via Lady Cynthia Asquith, who became his ‘patroness’, but Lawrence had a hot line to Barrie through Mary Ansell long before Asquith became Barrie’s secretary.

  * See Appendix (p. 293 below) on D. H. Lawrence, Mary Ansell, and Women in Love.

  * Jim sucked on a pipe constantly.

  * Carol Reed would become a film director – Our Man in Havana, A Kid for Two Farthings, The Agony and the Ecstasy, etc. Daphne’s son Kits assisted on the first.

  * Letter from Daphne du Maurier to Maureen Baker-Munton, 4 July 1957. The other occasion was in 1957 when she wrote to her husband, Tommy, confessing her affairs.

  * The Faust reference is detailed and incontrovertible, although the original notion of a pagan choir probably occurred to Daphne on a trip through the Valley of the Rhone, where she and her friend Clara Vyvyan witnessed a primitive service in a church in the mountains. The holiday is described in Vyvyan’s book Down the Rhone on Foot (1955).

  CHAPTER TWO

  Breakdown and suicide

  In 1954 Daphne began experiencing physical symptoms of another breakdown. Margaret Forster wrote simply: ‘Daphne felt strange and could not account for it. . .’

  From her stories, and her decision to put her life in order, we know that Daphne’s awakening had begun, but there was a long way to go before she could look outside the ‘prison cell’. Her discussions with Peter Davies had made her conscious of her predicament. She had a modicum of objectivity and had begun to see that her fantasy life was impinging on the real world to the detriment of her marriage and possibly other facets of her life.

  Now, fired by events, she embarked on a lengthy period of soul-searching, surrounding herself with books about psychology and ancient religion. In the process, she discovered Jung and was drawn to his division of the psyche into the No. 1 conscious self and the No. 2 unconscious, creative self, which gave her a modern way to understand ‘boy’. It was at this time that she wrote to Flavia that being ‘madly boyish... has a lot to do with my writing’. Her boy-self was her No. 2, her creative unconscious. That was henceforth how she thought about it. She made it her purpose to follow Jung and find a new balance between her two selves. Naturally, she turned to writing to effect this balance.

  The idea for The Scapegoat came to her in 1955 while on holiday in the du Maurier homeland of Sarthe, in north-west France. Its title implies Daphne’s status as victim, ‘scapegoat of the family’s sins’. The author’s two selves are the Englishman John (No. 1 self) and his physical double and dark side, the Frenchman Jean (No. 2). As she later wrote to Maureen: ‘The two sides of that man’s nature [John/Jean] had to fuse together to give birth to a third, well-balanced.’ The novel, filmed with Alec Guinness, is a telling analysis of where her thinking had brought her only a few years now before Peter committed suicide.

  However, Daphne’s good intentions were thrown out of the window when, in July 1957, Tommy became ill. The diagnosis of Lord Evans, under whose care he fell, was that he had suffered a nervous breakdown, that there was an underlying psychological problem which manifested itself in his excessive drinking, leading to liver damage, arterial dysfunction, ‘personality deterioration’ and collapse. Evans realised that Tommy’s troubled relationship with Daphne lay at the bottom of it. He told Daphne that she could be as useful as the pills he could give her husband. Meanwhile, to complicate the issue, Tommy confessed to having been leading a double life in London with a mistress.*

  Daphne was knocked back by the revelations of Tommy’s infidelity. Biographers have implied that this led to her most serious nervous breakdown in 1957–8. But Daphne had been unfaithful to her husband on and off for sixteen years, possibly with both female and male lovers. She had insisted on separate bedrooms at Menabilly, and mocked him when he demurred. Would she have had a breakdown because he had conducted an affair with seemly solicitude a long way from home?

  Nagging at the back of Daphne’s mind was the feeling that Tommy’s illness fitted into what she referr
ed to as ‘a strange chain of events’. After My Cousin Rachel, which predicted Gertrude’s death, Gertrude had died suddenly. Now, after ‘Monte Verita’, in which she had Tommy (as Victor) suffer a breakdown, Tommy really was having a breakdown. And there had been other more mundane coincidences. When she wrote about a character catching German measles in The Scapegoat, she herself contracted the disease within the month. When she wrote about a pregnant woman having to have a blood transfusion in the novel, her daughter Tessa gave birth to a son who had to have two transfusions.

  Immediately after Tommy’s collapse, on 4 July 1957, Daphne wrote a letter to Maureen Baker-Munton, telling her that she accepted blame for the parlous state of their marriage and Tommy’s decline; she then came clean with him, by letter, about Puxley, Ellen and Gertrude.* It had a disastrous effect. He never fully recovered from it. Had she filled him in about playing ‘boy’ and finding in the arms of women the love she hadn’t received from Mo? Did she share with him her awakening to what had been going on in her childhood?

  All that we know is that Daphne got it into her head that Tommy was seeing things wrong. She wrote to Oriel Malet, ‘I do feel very much like Gerda in that fairy tale [The Snow Queen], knowing that the ice is not yet out of Kay’s eye, and wondering what is the right thing to do about it.’ Kay was Tommy; Daphne told Oriel that if she had anything secret to say about Tommy, she could use Kay as his name.

  It is likely that when Daphne confessed all to Tommy in 1957 she told him more or less what she told Maureen Baker-Munton in the letter of 4 July the same year, that her affair with Puxley and her ‘obsessions – you can only call them that – for poor old Ellen D and Gertrude – were all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself, partly to do with my muddled troubles, and writing, and a fear of facing reality’.

  Her ‘muddled troubles’ concerned her relationship with her father, murky with the influence of Uncle Jim. Her ‘fear of facing reality’ was due to the glimpses she had (in the New York court room) that living and writing within the fantasy realm to which she had been ‘introduced’ as a child was compulsive, and inimical to her and her life with Tommy.

  But did she accuse Uncle Jim? Did she tell Tommy that as a child she, like the Llewelyn Davies boys, had been drawn into this fantasy world by Jim and had ceded control of her mind to him? Was that what Tommy refused to see?

  Between 1957 and 1959 Daphne wrote the stories in The Breaking Point which are damning of Jim. The suggestion is that, like Peter, she had awakened to the control Jim exercised over her. But how much did Daphne know? Writers deliver truths about their lives unconsciously through their fiction. We cannot be sure what Daphne consciously knew of the extent of Jim’s influence over her at any point.

  In The Snow Queen the little boy Kay gets a splinter of the hobgoblin’s looking-glass in his eye. This has the power to make everything good or beautiful that is reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything worthless and bad is exaggerated and made worse than ever.

  Daphne wrote to Oriel that ‘the ice is not yet out of Kay’s eye’. The implication is that Tommy was seeing things worse than they were, which in turn suggests that, in the summer of 1957, Daphne was still to some extent ‘clouded over’ about Jim.

  Daphne doubted not only Tommy, but also his doctors – ‘I am inclined to think [they] have made matters worse.’ In her eyes, at this stage, Tommy was the victim, not her.

  The mind does everything in its power to avoid a breakdown, to rationalise a situation, to distort ‘the facts’ to make an impulse seem less threatening. But Daphne, especially in her conversations with Peter Davies, was getting under the mind’s defences: she wanted to know what the hypnotist had told her to forget. When she found it, then reality, and anxieties connected with the truth, came rushing in.

  By the beginning of 1958, she was in such a state that Oriel became seriously concerned for her sanity.

  Bing became obsessed with some plot which she believed was being hatched against herself, and especially against Tommy. For a time she even persuaded herself that they might try to get at her through me, in Paris. She rang me several times, warning me not to go out at night alone, and to avoid all public places, such as the metro... I had either to believe that Bing had gone completely off her head, or that some sort of fearful plot was actually afoot, which might lead, in true Guy Fawkes fashion, to bombs at Buckingham Palace. No-one could shake her out of her delusions.1

  Daphne suffered the pains of paranoia.

  We must be patient. . . Unless we recognise it in time, accept it, understand it, we are all destroyed, just as the people in ‘The Birds’ were destroyed... For all our sakes, we must know that dark side . . .2

  Only her son, Kits, could reach her, and did so, just as seven-year-old Jamie Barrie had reached his mother ninety years earlier. Kits encouraged Daphne to turn her fears into a fantasy game, giving everyone weird tribal names, and he finally made her laugh.

  By mid-way through ’58, Daphne began to exorcise her fears by pulling together the stories in The Breaking Point. Now, she could understand. Now, she knew. ‘There comes a moment in the life of every individual,’ she wrote, ‘when reality must be faced. When this happens, it is as though some link between emotion and reason is stretched to the limit of endurance, and sometimes snaps.’

  Every one of the Breaking Point stories is about disillusionment and treachery, Barrie’s treachery, each one lifting the pressure from her system and perhaps saving her. She wrote to Oriel:

  I have been right down into the depths of horror, but I am coming out now.

  ‘The Chamois’ is the subtlest of the stories. It announces Daphne’s decision to go on the hunt for the goat-foot god responsible for her family’s misery. Writing it was another example of Daphne’s astonishing will, her courage and, as ever, her complete faith in the power of texts to change real life.

  The chamois is an image of fluency in Daphne’s story, its ability to climb to the highest peaks a metaphor for mystical potential. She accords the animal a sixth sense. Stephen persuades his wife to accompany him on a hunting trip. He hunts only chamois. He wants them dead because their ability to climb so high terrifies him; while his wife loves them for that very reason and despises ‘the communion of flesh’ that has bridged her soul and his spiritually barren soul.

  The wife in the story is clearly Daphne, and Stephen represents Tommy, who, as Daphne saw it, was out of touch with his spiritual side.

  The goatherd who will take them to the chamois has ‘the voice of a child’ and hypnotic eyes. There is an otherworldly feel, even shades of shamanism, about him: he is called Jesus, or Zus (like Zeus) for short. He and the chamois are identified: they share the same ‘whistle’ and merge into a half-man, half-goat amalgam, the satyr of myth – Pan.

  The wife is ‘seized with a kind of horror, for the man’s eyes do not go with the gentle, childish voice’. Like Barrie he has ‘the sightless gaze of a man without vision’, apparently absent from the real world; but if his eyes rested on you, they did so ‘with a searching stare impossible to hold’.

  That night she has a dream about him, and is shocked that she finds Zus’s primitive nature sexually attractive. There is something sensual but repulsive about him. She is afraid of him, but also physically attracted. She realises now that she must turn against him, and join the hunt.

  Stephen was after chamois. I was after Man. Both were symbolic of something abhorrent to our natures. We wanted to destroy the thing that shamed us most.

  Imagine how Daphne’s thinking at this time fed into the mind of Peter Davies. The mind set of everyone had deteriorated in 1957 – Tommy, Daphne, Peter and Jack. Only Daphne would pull through.

  According to Nico, in October ’54 Peter had been ‘in good form’, although in the same year Peter himself referred to ‘my innate and circumstantial gloom’. By October ’57 Nico wrote to Nanny: ‘The business I believe to be thriving, but Peter is not. He hasn’t been really well for a yea
r or two. I can’t remember how much I’ve said about this in the past, but I haven’t really known what the trouble is until this year.’3 Unaware of what was really going on, he believed that Peter’s fundamental problem was emphysema and indeed Peter was admitted to King Edward VII Sanatorium at Midhurst in West Sussex, a hospital specialising in lung disease, for three or four weeks that autumn. Emphysema was also one of the causes of Jack’s death, listed on his death certificate, and he too was in serious depressive decline in 1957.

  Breathing affects emotions, and emotions affect breathing. Anxiety and anger are associated with accelerated breathing, and depression with suppressed breathing. It is common for lung disease and depression to go hand in hand. Either can trigger the other. ‘The vicious circle can begin with depression,’ confirms Dr Rachel Norwood of the National Jewish Medical and Research Centre in Denver. Also, depressed people tend to smoke, and smoking can cause chronic pulmonary disease, which, with emphysema, is what got Jack.

  In April 1959, after making only a partial recovery, Tommy announced his retirement from Royal service. On 19 July he returned to live full-time at Menabilly, initially in the care of a nurse. Daphne, seeing how dependent he was going to be – at one stage Tommy had threatened to shoot himself – realised she would have to have a project to take her away from Menabilly. So began The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte (1960), with its built-in requirement for research in Yorkshire and London.

  In 1954, she had received a serendipitous invitation from the publisher Macdonald to write an Introduction to Wuthering Heights, and Oriel had sent her Fannie Ratchford’s The Brontës’ Web of Childhood. Ratchford, the first to transcribe the Brontë juvenilia, published her complete analysis in 1941. It is amazing, given Daphne’s interest in the Brontës, and her empathy with the Brontë siblings’ intense involvement with their imaginary worlds, Angria and Gondal, that she hadn’t already read it, but its significance in the unravelling of her own secret life should not be underestimated. After a first visit to the Parsonage Museum with Oriel and Flavia in 1955, the idea to write the biography dawned.